Lucia Mapetla, Pretoria: It is rare that in the run-up to elective conferences, you find public spats occurring within the Democratic Alliance, the Minority Front and the Independent Democrats.

However, the campaigning leading up to the elective conferences of the ANC, as well as Cope and the IFP, is characterised by insults, vulgarity and bitter infighting.

In the ANC, members are trading insults in campaigning for Paul Mashatile and Nomvula Mokonyane. There are accusations and counter-accusations. In the IFP, Simingaye Mcoyi has been summoned to a disciplinary committee hearing for denigrating in the press Musa Zondi's supporters.

Cope, too, has joined this culture of public feuding.

All these parties are divided, with the ANC arguably split into three factions: the Jacob Zuma, the Left and the Thabo Mbeki camps.

In all three parties, the youth have been used to canvass for particular leaders, and even to insult and intimidate party elders.

This reflects how, to a certain extent, the youth has lost sight of the value of respect in political discourse.

There is, for example, a thin line dividing the behaviour of the Cope youth wing's Anele Mda and ANC Youth League president Julius Malema. Mda used a derogatory term to describe a white leader in her own party. Now she calls Mosiuoa Lekota "a thug".

The youth supporting IFP national chairwoman Zanele Magwaza-Msibi are as rude as Malema and Mda.

Yet elder statesmen and politicians, such as Zuma and Mbhazima Shilowa, do not publicly condemn the language of the youth.

If this youth is a reflection of our future political leaders, politics will have to do without integrity and respect.

I do not think Nelson Mandela, AP Mda, Oliver Tambo or Walter Sisulu ever behaved like this generation of youth leaders.

Cope, having denounced Malema, should have asked Mda to apologise to Lekota, who is her father's age. It might have been wrong for Lekota to take his feud with Shilowa into the open, but he did not resort to the vulgarity exhibited by the youth leader.